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By Root 848 0

Congressmen who speculated in the ‘certificates of owed pay’ that had been issued … to the soldiers of the Revolution. It was an old trick, and a simple one: a question of altering the value of the monetary unit. Twenty-nine Congressmen … bought up the certificates from veterans and others at twenty per cent of their face value. The nation … then ‘assumed’ responsibility for redeeming the certificates at their full face value.” [This was the “Scandal of the Assumption.”]

“Only God knows how much gold the people have bought during the war, from 1939 to the present time. The trick is simple. Whenever the Rothschild and other gents in the gold business have gold to sell, they raise the price. The public is fooled by propagandising the devaluation of the dollar, or other monetary unit according to the country chosen to be victimized.”

For a general description of these crimes we need first to distinguish between embodied value and abstract value. When you exchange a commodity for cash, the object—the body of the thing—is abandoned, and you are left with the symbol of its market value, the dollar bills in your pocket. In one of the phases of market exchange, value is detached from the object and carried symbolically. The symbols of market value are supposed to bear some relation to the commodity, of course—you don’t pay $12 for a hacksaw unless you think it’s a $12 hacksaw—but there is always a little slack in the line. The symbol is alienable. There is a gap between it and the body. In a famous essay on “Geometry and Experience,” Albert Einstein wrote: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” Symbolization in either exchange or cognition requires that the symbol be detached from the particular thing.* We could not think mathematically if we always used real oranges and apples the way children do in the first grade; in a market economy, without money we would have to lug the table and chair to the store when we needed beefsteak and wine. In a symbolic commerce we hope, of course, that our currency or our mathematics will bear some relation to reality when we come back down to earth, but for the duration we sever the link.

In these terms, the arch criminal for Pound is the man who makes sure that value is detached from its concrete embodiment and then “plays the gap” between symbol and object, between abstract money and embodied wealth. Either the swindler fools the public into using a phantom currency and then grows rich on its increase, or else he gets a monopoly (either on a particular commodity or, better, on the actual symbol of value) and stirs up the market, inducing fluctuations in the relationship between embodied and symbolic value and getting rich playing the one against the other. All the crimes that Pound warns us against come down to one: to profit on the alienation of the symbol from the real. “The finance of financiers is largely the juggling of general tickets against specific tickets.” In a corrupt economy the real worth of the creations of man falls every time some crook makes money by a mere manipulation of the market, or worse, makes money out of nothing. “An increasingly large proportion of goods never gets its certificate [of value] …,” says Pound. “We artists have known this for a long time, and laughed. We took it as our punishment for being artists, we expected nothing else, but now it occurs to the artisan …”

The difference between an image and a symbol is simple: an image has a body and a symbol does not. And when an image changes, it undergoes metamorphosis: body changes into body without any intervening abstraction—without, that is, the gap which is both the freedom and the alienation of symbol-thought and symbol-change. To connect Pound’s economics to his aesthetics, we need simply say that the crime he would prevent is one in which the enemies of the imagination enrich themselves through the trick of symbolic thought. The economist who connects credit to sheep or who writes that “the Navy